the communist manifesto

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League,

a working men’s association, first exclusively German, later on

international, and under the political conditions of the Continent before

1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in

November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a

complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in

German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in

London a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. A

French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the

insurrection of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen

Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney’s Red Republican, London,

1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 – the first great

battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie – drove again into the

background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the

European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was,

again, as it had been before the Revolution of February, solely between

different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced

to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing

of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian

movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted

down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the

Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested

and, after eighteen months’ imprisonment, they were tried in October

1852. This celebrated ―Cologne Communist Trial‖ lasted from October 4

till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of

imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately

after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining

members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to

oblivion.

When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for

another attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men’s

Association8 sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim

of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and

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America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the

Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad

enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of

Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in

Germany.*

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties,

entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class,

which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion.

The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats

even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’s

minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing

the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for workingclass emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its

breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found

them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were

dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most

of them had long since severed their connection with the International,

were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at

Swansea, their president [W. Bevan] could say in their name:

―Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.‖ In fact, the principles of

the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men

of all countries.

The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the

German text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England,

and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where

the translation was published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. From this

English version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New York.

Since then, at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated,

have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted

in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was

published at Herzen’s Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second

one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish

edition is to be found in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a

fresh French translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a

* Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as

such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he

did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by state credit. [Note

by Engels.]

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Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The

German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether

at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in

Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told,

because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of

Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production. Of

further translations into other languages I have heard but had not seen.

Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern

working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread,

the most international production of all socialist literature, the common

platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to

California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto.

By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of

the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France,

both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually

dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by

all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to

capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside

the working-class movement, and looking rather to the ―educated‖

classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become

convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had

proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist.

It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it

touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the

working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France,

and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class

movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on

the Continent at least, ―respectable‖; communism was the very opposite.

And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that ―the emancipation

of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,‖ there could be

no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we

have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to

state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs

to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the

prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social

organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is

built up, and from that which alone can be explained the political and

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intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of

mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in

common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests

between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the

history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which,

nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed

class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of

the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same

time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all

exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what

Darwin’s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually

approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently

progressed towards it is best shown by my ―Conditions of the Working

Class in England.‖ But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring

1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost

as clear as those in which I have stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the

following:

―However much that state of things may have altered

during the last twenty-five years, the general principles

laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct

today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be

improved. The practical application of the principles will

depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at

all times, on the historical conditions for the time being

existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on

the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of

Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very

differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides

of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying

improved and extended organisation of the working

class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in

the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris

Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held

political power for two whole months, this programme

has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially

was proved by the Commune, viz., that ―the working

class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state

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machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.‖ (See The

Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of

the International Working Men’s Association 1871,

where this point is further developed.) Further, it is selfevident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient

in relation to the present time, because it comes down

only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the

Communists to the various opposition parties (Section

IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are

antiquated, because the political situation has been

entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept

from off the Earth the greater portion of the political

parties there enumerated.

―But then, the Manifesto has become a historical

document which we have no longer any right to alter.‖

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the

greater portion of Marx’s ―Capital.‖ We have revised it in common, and I

have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.

Frederick Engels

January 30, 1888, London

8 The International Working Men’s Association — An international association

made up of communist and other radical political groups, mass trades

unions, cooperatives and workers educational associations with members

across Europe and the USA. On the basis of his fame as author of the

Communist Manifesto, Marx was invited on to its General Council at its

founding in 1864 and wrote most of the International’s programmatic

documents. Marx attended all the meetings of the General Council and was

an active participant in all its affairs. The International declined and split

after the defeat of the Paris Commune and the headquarters of the

International was moved to New York.